Your Thursday Briefing By ADEEL HASSAN |
| Good morning. |
| Here's what you need to know: |
| • Ten years after Katrina. |
| President Obama tours several rebuilt neighborhoods of New Orleans today and speaks at 5 p.m. ahead of this weekend's 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. |
| The New Orleans economy is thriving, and the city is now protected with a $14.5 billion levee system. But some areas have returned to pre-Katrina levels of poverty and violence. |
| • Rocky markets and a rethink. |
| Global stock markets are strongly higher but volatile, taking a cue from China, where the main index added more than 5 percent today in the last hour of trading, and from Wall Street, which gained 4 percent by the end of Wednesday. |
| The deepening uncertainty about China's economy is forcing a reassessment in industries that built their strategies and plotted their futures around China's rise. |
| • Death in real time. |
| Wednesday's fatal shooting of a reporter and a cameraman in Virginia, and the horrifying images it produced, started a new chapter in the intersection of video, violence and social media. |
| Documents filed in a civil court case in 2012 showed that employees at WDBJ-TV were deeply concerned about the conduct of the gunman, known as Bryce Williams, soon after he was hired. |
| • Still weighing a campaign. |
| Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. told Democratic National Committee members that he was uncertain if his family had the "emotional fuel" for a presidential campaign after the death of his son Beau. |
| • China holds 23 linked to blasts. |
| The Chinese authorities said today they had detained 23 people in connection with the chemical blasts that killed more than 100 people in Tianjin two weeks ago. |
| Public anger about safety standards is growing after a series of industrial disasters, including mining accidents and factory fires. |
| • Prep-school rape trial. |
| Closing arguments in the trial of Owen Labrie, a 19-year-old St. Paul's School graduate, are scheduled today in a Concord, N.H., courtroom. |
| In many states, laws requiring evidence that force was used in a rape would have made it difficult for the accuser to bring charges. |
| • Fallen officers. |
| Police Officer Henry Nelson, 51, who was fatally shot while responding to a report of stabbing, was the second Louisiana officer killed in four days, and the fifth in four months. |
| MARKETS |
| • Second-quarter U.S. growth, estimated last month at a 2.3 percent annual rate, is updated today by the Commerce Department. |
| • Amgen's version of a powerful new cholesterol-lowering drug comes before the Food and Drug Administration today. The first in the new class of drug, by Sanofi Regeneron, was approved in July. |
| • Gap Inc., owner of the Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy chains, is the latest to say it will stop requiring employees to work shifts determined at the last minute and will instead give workers 10 to 14 days' notice. |
| • Microsoft said 75 million people downloaded Windows 10, a free upgrade for most, in its first month. |
| It took the previous version of the operating system, at a price of $15 to $40, six months to reach 100 million licensees. |
| NOTEWORTHY |
| • The girl with the new book. |
| "The Girl in the Spider's Web," the first book in the series created by Stieg Larsson to be written by a different author, is released today in 24 countries and on Tuesday in the U.S. and Canada. (Mr. Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004, at the age of 50.) |
| The first three books, about the genius punk hacker Lisbeth Salander and her sometime partner, the crusading investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist, sold 80 million copies worldwide. |
| Our reviewer writes that "Salander and Blomkvist have survived the authorship transition intact and are just as compelling as ever." |
| • A panda cub dies. |
| The smaller of twin giant pandas born at the National Zoo in Washington has died. The other cub appears to be healthy, and staff members are optimistic about its chances for survival. |
| • Iranian epic. |
| The world premiere of the director Majid Majidi's "Muhammad," a 171-minute film about the early years of the prophet of Islam, opens the 39th Montreal World Film Festival today. |
| At over $50 million, it is the most expensive movie ever made in Iran. |
| • Fashion spotlight. |
| The tennis star Serena Williams worked with Nike to design new looks for on court and off, with leopard and snakeskin prints, peekaboo backs and a personal motto. She's also the cover story of our Sunday magazine. |
| • In memoriam. |
| Amelia Boynton Robinson, 104, who was called the matriarch of the voting rights movement, died on Wednesday in Montgomery, Ala. She helped organize a 1965 march from Selma, Ala., to demand equal rights to register to vote. |
| Marcy Borders, 42, who became known as the "dust lady" from a picture of her covered in ash and grime from the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, died of stomach cancer. |
| BACK STORY |
| "Guinness World Records," which is celebrating its 60th anniversary today, has rights to a listing in its own book. |
| It's the biggest-selling annual book ever: 132 million since 1955. |
| That's in a different league from the longest eyelashes on a dog (6.69 inches), the largest bubble-gum bubble blown (20 inches) or the longest human fingernails (32 feet, 3.8 inches). |
| It all began with a trivia question raised among friends: Which is the fastest game bird in Britain, the golden plover or the red grouse? No reference book could tell them. |
| But one of the friends was the chairman of Guinness Breweries in Dublin, with the means to find out. |
| He hired Norris and Ross McWhirter, sports journalists in London with photographic memories, to compile a marketing booklet full of such superlatives in 1954. |
| They expanded it for commercial publication the next year, and by Christmas it was a British best seller. |
| Today, "Guinness World Records," now owned by the same company as the Ripley's Believe It or Not chain, gets 50,000 records applications a year, and it approves 6,000. Its 65 "adjudicators" referee hundreds of records live. |
| And the fastest game bird in Britain? The spur-wing goose, the brothers said. |
| Victoria Shannon contributed reporting. |
| Your Morning Briefing is published weekdays at 6 a.m. Eastern and updated on the web all morning. |
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